An Outcast's Funeral
by Shadow Haloed Angel
Summary: It's always painful looking back on the life of someone you never really knew. Pure angst.


I was never supposed to feel. It was never supposed to be this way. If I cannot feel, why is it that I feel now, why is it that I feel nothing?

I hate that I feel nothing. It disgusts me. I shouldn't even be here, but it doesn't matter now. Not as we all stand here in silence, nobody wishing to speak. I wonder if you would have wanted it this way. Maybe it is merely that nobody knew you well enough to know what to say.

I don't even know your full name, but then, maybe Turks don't have full names anyway. I wouldn't know. I have only ever had one name anyway, the one you gave me.

Elena looks shaken; Reno looks whiter than paper, paler than a ghost. Rude is impassive as ever. Do they not feel either? No. The hints of red speak otherwise. Turks don't feel, people do. But then, I was never meant to be a person.

It is sad, I think, that such a life should end in this pathetic gathering of six. Maybe that too speaks volumes as outcasts mourn an outcast.

I have heard that one should never mourn alone, but then, I have no other choice. I cannot choose not to mourn. Reno, Rude and Elena have each other, as do Rufus and Lazard. I have noone. I stand alone, as I have always been. A lone angel of death.

Finally a voice echoes in the untouched silence; Rufus leading us in Wutaiain prayers for the dead. Lazard joins him first, and then the other Turks. I don't know the words, I don't know how they know them either, and again I feel left out of the loop. An inhuman extra. I attempt to say them anyway, my tongue stumbling over the foreign phrases of a language so alien to my nature. Whilst I studied Wutaiain it seems strange to be speaking the language of a people I have killed, and these words don't feel right. It doesn't feel right that you are gone, doesn't feel right to say goodbye.

Once more my eyes scan the ice-cold faces of the Turks. I know each one of them of course: Reno, the bright and vivacious redhead. Cocky, but the best damn pilot in ShinRa. Elena, the rookie. Well, with a family like hers I am not sure the term rookie can correctly be applied. She always had a soft spot for you, though noone was ever certain whether it was simple hero worship or something more. You knew it though, and always treated her gently. Then Rude. Nobody knows Rude, other than Reno. The silent, hulking, gentle giant. The explosives expert. Each of their deaths will hurt ShinRa more than the last, but the greatest cost has already been paid.

I never told you I remembered you, never told you I missed you, never thanked you. I never made the time or the effort to heal the rift between our departments. Here we stand, united in grief. I suppose it stands as a testament to your legacy that the other Turks did not turn me away. The SOLDIER General mourning the head of the Turks? They are staring at me though, as if expecting me to laugh. Reno is anyway, his hatred searing my soul, or it would if I had a soul. Rude sits in silent judgement, face expressionless, unreadable behind those glasses. Elena is frowning, confused, as if expecting me to cry, to show sign of weakness, humanity, but I can't. I wish this pain wasn't so knotted up that for the first time since my childhood I could cry. Perhaps I don't even have tear ducts anymore. I am so inhuman after all that it would hardly be surprising to discover that a combination of the mako and the Professor removed them to prevent weakness.

I used to dream sometimes that you were my father, my real father. Ha, it's laughable, that I, the perfect SOLDIER, would have given anything and everything I had to have been your son. Noone would believe it standing here. You always were the master though. However good I have become at concealing my emotions, you were better. You always wore a mask. I am not sure anyone ever knew what you really felt, really thought. That is part of why you survived in a cut-throat world where you were so different. You showed all of us how to be different and how to be proud.

In a life where I have missed so much and thought nothing of it, expected nothing, for the first time in my life I feel pain. Not the physical pain of the tortures and experiments to 'improve' and 'enhance' me, but emotional pain. Real pain.

I miss you Tseng.


End file.
